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Now, up to this point in our short history of writing screenplays, just to give you context... Toy Story took about 36 months to write and finally get it right, like all the passes, all the rewrites, blah blah blah. A Bug's Life: about 38. Toy Story 2: three months. |
[audience laughter] |
Now, how were we able to rewrite 75% of the picture in three months? Well, we were able to do that -- and I only kinda saw this in hindsight, because we were working too fast to think about it at the time -- was... the characters were already known. This is one of the biggest insights for me: that's where most of your ... |
And you can't do that separately from the plot. Sometimes you have to rewrite the plot again and again until you find these character insights. |
There were three preconceived key structural changes. What I mean by that, it's a fancy quick term to say, we had been peeking over the fence and looking in there and we were all griping on our side at the B-team going, "Oh, they should have done this, they should have done that." But there were a couple of ideas that ... |
And then the last was... most of those three months were actually spent on the three characters that were new, that we didn't know, which were the Roundup Gang. |
The Roundup Gang -- the key in making the Roundup Gang was making them represent all aspects of not being played with. So each of them had a role. You had Jessie, who was -- we liked to say was a bipolar Elly May. That was Joe Ranft -- he sort of caught that in a perfect... right on the nose. She shared Woody's past. B... |
The Prospector was a kind and wise uncle on the outside, but he'd never ever been touched, played with [garbled] kept him in the box. So inside he was bitter an vengeful. |
And Bullseye was sort of the pet, the child. He was the innocent, still eager to please [garbled]. He was the swing vote. |
So once we had each of their POVs figured out, writing the scene to introduce them actually was fun. Realise, it's really all about character... |
[clip from Toy Story 2] |
I feel like I could talk the rest of the keynote just on the subject of character, because it fascinates me so much. And it intimidates me tremendously. You're basically giving birth to the illusion of a real person and all their complexities. When I'm having trouble with a character, often I'll find myself going over ... |
And it just reminds me that there's an infinite amount of stories lurking around every person. There's a quote that Fred Rogers -- Mr Rogers -- would carry around in his wallet, and it would say, "There isn't anyone you couldn't love once you've heard their story." And it's really true. They're all sitting around you; ... |
Another piece of literature that -- this is gonna seem weird -- gets me out of my funk is a passage from a novel. It's from American Pastoral by Philip Roth. And the main character has this speech about meeting people. And I was gonna read this passage. He said: |
"You fight your superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance, as untank like as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten toes instead of te... |
[audience laughter and applause] |
I mean, isn't storytelling meeting people? I mean, the story starts, we make our first impression of the characters we meet and then proceed further into the story to discover if we guessed correctly, hoping both that we'll be right in our assumptions but also that there'll be more to them than meets the eye, that some... |
So, after all that experience on Toy Story 2, even more pain awaited us on Monsters Incorporated. Now you'd think we'd remember lessons we've learned on earlier projects, but somehow every new story seems to camouflage all of its problems in completely new ways. |
Now, remember how I mentioned on the research early on: know what you write. Another way to put this is: know your world. The more you know, the more believable your story can be. Now in all previous films, research was possible: Toy Story, you could go to toy stores, we can talk about our childhood, we could go back t... |
But how do you research a made-up world? You can't really. That's the rub with fantasy pictures. Fantasies should equal rules. For me, magic isn't a five-letter word, it's a four-letter word. I'm not a big fan of magic, and I like to use it as sparingly as possible. Movies are all about caring and worrying. And why sho... |
Alexander Mackendrick, the filmmaker, had a great quote that: "Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty." But you can't set somebody up for anticipation and mingle it with uncertainty unless you know the parameters that your in. Life is one big biosphere of cause and effect. You need to give us all the rules so w... |
Having said that, you know, you can have as fantastical a story as you want. You can take tremendous licence. There's a Grimm's fairytale that literally starts out: There once was a bird and a mouse and a sausage that lived in a house together. And you go, "Okay... Go on..." |
[audience laughter] |
You're willing to believe that a fowl and a food product can cohabitate [garbled]. And that's fine, but you have to stay consistent with those rules after that. |
You remember our key image in the first few years of writing on Monsters Incorporated, they always had this emotional touchstone at the centre of their story. Which was great, but we still could not get the film to work right, at the beginning, like the major structure of it. And it wasn't until we added this: Scream, ... |
It was a logical resource of their world; it dictated how their cities were built, how their jobs were performed, why a monster would become power hungry and greedy, and how a monster could accidentally be insensitive to a child being scared. |
The next big mistake was the glasses. With an early version of Scully, he was a former scarer who had an industrial accident. He had been trapped in a bedroom and actually witnessed the aftermath of one of his scares and saw how a child cries and the parents had to take care of him. And then he never wanted to scare ag... |
Well, it was just too complicated, like it was me trying to explain to you right now. And the idea was really -- it was generated from a misguided belief and a fear that we thought nobody's going to like a main character that scares kids. And that's really where that idea was born from. But we realised it was just taki... |
So we found a new way to make Scully's scaring children acceptable to the audience: we never showed him doing it. We would show him go behind the door, you'd hear a roar, come back out. And we never showed it until the one time we wanted it to be distasteful. So, it's amazing when you put yourself in a corner what you'... |
Ok. By this time, I find myself starting to use this metaphor all the time, that still holds true for me, at least. I've come to believe that a perfect metaphor for creating stories is an archaeological dig: You pick a site where you believe your story is buried, and you dig. And you uncover a few bones. And from those... |
So, we're going to go on to my most personal story wounds, which is Finding Nemo. This is the first time I had to write outside of the same gang of guys that I'd always worked with. And it was a little scary. I had read somewhere that all creative endeavours are exercises in closing the gap between intention and effect... |
So I chose a very, very personal subject that I had deep feelings about, and ironically it filled the gap between intention and effect of fatherhood: I had issues with my Dad, and worried about creating issues with my son. |
Many journalists have asked me the question: Would Nemo have worked as well in 2D? And my response is always: I can't answer that. I thought of Nemo because of the medium. Without my knowledge of 3D it would have never been born. Any good storyteller is gonna make sure that their story and the medium they choose to tel... |
For Nemo, it was paramount for me that we pay closer attention to reality than ever before. I read this quote recently in an article, [garbled] interpretive and not realistic. And I really agree with it. There's something about animation because it's based in exaggeration and caricature that compels us to tell stories ... |
For Nemo I knew we had to play closer to the reality side than ever before. So for me, the water had to be as believable as possible. Like this video of water. But we then hit a big -- oh, I'm sorry, that's our computer-created water. This is the actual footage we [garbled] reference. |
So you can see, in doing our research and development for Nemo we came across a problem that we'd never encountered before: We made water that looked so real, we knew nobody would believe we'd done it. So we had to pull back, and make it ever so caricatured, or what we like to call 'hyper-realistic.' And why are we str... |
Well, even though these were talking fish with eyeballs swimming around, I felt the physics had to be absolutely accurate for the story to succeed. There would be very little drama if you didn't believe that the ocean and all the perils that are associated with it truly existed. |
Like Toy Story, there's no villain. And in Finding Nemo there's no villain. Sid and Darla are obstacles. There are no personal agendas of theirs to thwart the goals of our main characters. They're just doing their daily routines and getting in the way. The ocean is the antagonist of Nemo, and the representation of life... |
I'm also on a mini crusade beseeching all of you to just say no to flashbacks. Finding Nemo originally had flashbacks throughout. And I had read in every book and all the lectures, "Don't ever do flashbacks." I said, "Yeah yeah yeah, but I'll be different." |
And the opening tragedy that -- you know, at the beginning of the film, wasn't there. It wasn't told up front, originally. It was doled out in pieces throughout the story. We had one little flashback at the very beginning, which was Marlin's first view of his wife Coral before they married. And we see how they met. The... |
A little deeper into Act Two, then we go to hundreds of fish eggs quivering in their sleep in a cosy grotto as their proud parents watch them dream. And then we get into Act Three and there's the attack by the barracuda that takes Marlin's family and leaves only Nemo. |
And the last revealing flashback was played out during the fishing net sequence at the end, and we intercut between the net going down and this tragic thing happening. And it was cool. It was very cinematic and it was an interesting way to watch the film. |
One of the unfortunate by-products was that you didn't like Marlin. You never related to his overprotective, fearful nature at the beginning of the movie because you didn't understand where it came from, because you didn't know that information until the very end of the movie. |
So finally, after years of badgering, my peers finally convinced me to condense the story -- the backstory -- to just the day of the tragedy and tell the beginning at the beginning. And BOOM! You suddenly cared about Marlin. I didn't have to change any lines, I didn't have to change any readings. He suddenly wasn't ann... |
So, another interesting element of story on Nemo was music. Nemo was in constant in threat of becoming an ABC after-school special. And that's because the issue of the father and son was so direct it could easily have become sappy and treacly. And one crucial element that always managed to always anchor it was music. I... |
And not just music but music as a character. I had the composer Thomas Newman in mind from the very conception of this film. I knew that his music would be so important, it would have to practically be considered one of the movie's main characters: one of the legs of the table. For me, Tom's music was, I would say, the... |
Music's not just special to Nemo; it's one of the most powerful tools in any filmmaker's toolbox and shouldn't be only considered at the end of production. I'm kind of a geek in this sense. I have to have music playing when I write. I even make fake soundtracks of what I think the end result will be, just so that I can... |
It was even referenced directly in the script at times. So to show you how effective it can be at directing your emotional focus, I'm gonna play you a clip from Nemo without the score first... |
[clip from Nemo, first without music track then with music] |
Nemo! Where's Nemo? I gotta speak with him. |
What? What is it? |
Your dad's been fighting the entire ocean looking for you. |
My father? Really? |
Oh yeah. He's travelled hundreds of miles. He's been battling sharks and jellyfish and all sorts of-- |
Sharks? That can't be him. |
Are you sure? What was his name? Some sort of sport fish or something: tuna, uh, trout -- |
That's it! Marlin! The little clownfish from the reef. |
It's my dad! He took on a shark! |
I heard he took on three. |
Three sharks!? |
That's gotta be forty eight hundred teeth! |
You see, kid, after you were taken by diver Dan over there, your dad followed the boat you were on like a maniac. |
He's swimming and he's swimming and he's giving it all he's got and then three gigantic sharks capture him and he blows them up! And then dives thousands of feet and gets chased by a monster with huge teeth! He ties this demon to a rock and what does he get for a reward? He gets to battle an entire jellyfish forest! An... |
Wow! Ha ha ha! |
Oh, what a good daddy! |
He was lookin' for you after all, Sharkbait. |
[end clips; audience applause] |
Now you remember earlier in the keynote I said I'd elaborate more on audience participation and their unconscious desire to work for their entertainment. Well in Nemo, one of my co-writers, Bob Peterson and I, would analyse this issue at great lengths. We ended up with what we like to call 'The unifying theory of two p... |
If you construct your story correctly it compels the audience to conclude the answer is four. This works for every aspect of filmmaking down to a molecular level. Most obviously it works with editing -- of course you know the Eisenstein where they show the face, then they show the food, then they show the same face, an... |
But it also works in doling out plot lines, just like we saw in the Ryan's Daughter clip. It works with dialogue, where you don't say what you actually mean. It works with relationships: how to get something, because your adding what somebody says with somebody else. |
There's a great comedy sketch by Mike Nichols and Elaine May. I'm just gonna play the very beginning of it. But... it's just amazing how two plus two works so economically and so quick... |
Hello, Arthur? This is your mother... Do you remember me? |
[audience laughter] |
And whenever Bob and I are trying to introduce characters, we always wanted to do it as smart and economical as that skit. We'd always say, "It need to have that 'It's your mother, remember me' get-ability. You just right away got it like doing two plus two. |
There's a great quote about this very subject. |
"I think that for a movie or a play to say anything really truthful about life, it has to do so very obliquely, so as to avoid all pat conclusions and neatly tied-up ideas. The point of view it is conveying has to be completely entwined with a sense of life as it is, and has to be got across through a subtle injection ... |
In other words, don't let the strings show. Movie-making is all about manipulation, but it's only truly successful if your audience has no idea that you were manipulating. Always try to work with two plus two. |
So, I'm gonna slowly wrap up here. All of us at Pixar have learned quite a bit making these movies, but even moreso about ourselves as a studio. And even though we've never sat down and made any sort of mission statement, there are certain philosophies that we've come to adhere to over the years. |
One is: Tough for kids. We need to make these movies for us. We don't second guess who our audience is or what they want. What I always say is that we're filmgoers first and filmmakers second. It's better that you're in touch with the audience part of yourself than the filmmaker part of yourself. The only consideration... |
The other thing is: no formulas. Sort of the same thing in Toy Story, we sort of wanted to break the mold. We don't want to make the same thing twice. If we were to be starting to make a movie today, I'd say, well, I don't want to make anything with wise-cracking wildlife creatures crammed with A-list actor voice casti... |
So, when you have a formula appearing, don't do it, stop. Everyone keeps defining the frosting and then replicating it to death, and no one seems to be trying to get the recipe to the cake. Brad Bird has a great saying, which is: "Animation is a medium, not a genre." And it's true. We're making movies, and we work hard... |
The Catch-22 always in entertainment is that the audiences want the same success but different. And the only way you can do that is to be original, and the only way to be original is to dare to be stupid. And that's only possible if you're in some sort of creatively safe environment where you're willing to take risks. |
Look, the truth is that at Pixar we're not that good at getting it right. But we're really good at banding together and fixing our mistakes. And invariably we discover something fresh for having had the guts to go and do something really stupid and make that mistake. |
Tenting all of this is probably the only mantra I've ever heard said by everybody from the top down throughout my sixteen years, which is: just make good movies. This is always practically the ultimate solution to any of the problems: what is best for the movie. Not what's best for me, not what's best for you, what's b... |
Finally, I want to end on a quote by Walt Disney. |
"Fun and wonder are the important elements, in addition to quality in production and performance, which are most responsible for the success of Disney productions. Fun in the sense of cheerful reaction: the appeal to love of laughter. Wonder in that we appeal to constant wonder in men's minds, which is stimulated by th... |
This is the element of that quote that is the most overlooked and the least understood by those trying to succeed with animation. I don't mean financially; I mean artistically. If you don't have a natural love for this medium, and a burning desire to further the art form, then even a good story's going to end up being ... |
So, I want to thank you for joining me on my 'journey of pain.' |
[sound effect of heart monitor flatlining...] |
[59:26; extended audience applause] |
[59:54; Q&A commences] |
My summary of Stanton's key points on storycrafting: |
• Storytelling is knowing your ending and then building the story towards that satisfying conclusion, like how a joke builds towards the punchline. |
• The audience must like (empathize with) the main character, but this does not mean the main character must be a nice person. |
• Opposing Goals, or 'unity of opposites': Set up directly opposing desires between the main characters (protag/antag). |
• Be wrong as fast as you can, and persevere through the storycrafting process: writing is rewriting. |
• Story Physics: Find the truth in your story and debate it, try to prove it wrong. |
• Find your Key Image: the touchstone that epitomizes the emotional core of your story and keeps you on track. |
• Ensure there are powerful reasons why the Protagonist cannot simply walk away from the Problem. |
• The audience wants to know that they were right in their assumptions about the characters, but also they want to be surprised. They want to discover there is more than meets the eye. |
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